Suddenly, the day is open…

I woke up really early, the love of my life snoozing beside me, and I felt, well, hungry. Hadn’t eaten since Bruegger’s yesterday.

But the hell with that, I got to see my gurlfrend last nite!!! yayy!!

The stars aligned, hope sprung eternal, and the universe was just we two. Wow. If ever a word was more ideal, it would be that word at that sacred moment. Wow.

This morning, I planned on taking care of getting my car title transferred. But ah! Veteran’s Day! So I have some time on my hands.And I am here at Ike’s on Speedway.

Tried to get cable. No dice at that apartment. So, like the US Pacific Fleet in WWII, I am faced with a severe limitation and must improvise a plan of attack. Nice huh? worked in a little military talk to celebrate the day.

Here’s the thing. I don’t have internet at home. Qwest is bullshit, and none of the cable modem vendors are contracted to operate in the complex.

Well THANK FUCKING HEAVEN for free wireless (and T-Mobile). And, thank heaven for MediaMax. I just signed up for storage space there, and plan to upgrade to much bigger next month. In the meantime, I am going to move the stuff I need/want close to that site.

See, hard drives are getting cheaper, but they’re still hard drives. moving parts, prone to breakdown. This MacBook is most of the way to ideal for a laptop in the 21st century: thin, light and fast. Only thing: It has a hard drive. Ick. In fact, it’s so thin that I forget the hard drive is in there. Easy to do…

A year from now, I predict that solid state SATA laptop drives will be available cheaply enough for the upgrade to be possible. They’re there now: 64 GB drives ready to drop into a waiting laptop. But they’re not available where a person (me, say) could buy one and drop it into this laptop.

A similar evolution happened with iPods. iPods were basically hard drives with a simple OS on top of them. Because they used hard drives for so long, I have avoided them like the plague. That is, until the iPod Nano came out in 2005 and was suddenly a feasible choice. I waited till the 2nd Generation Nano came out to finally take the plunge with the 8 GB model. Now, solid-state is the way the iPod will go moving forward. this will also be true of new laptops a few years from now. The computer as corner shrine in the living room or the kitchen is an artifact of the 1990s, and if it’s not apparent to you now, it sure will be in a short while. Apple led the way with the Digital Hub concept, and laptops without spinning hard disks will be a step in that evolution.

So here is the vision of a scant three years hence….

I’m sitting in some coffee joint (like this one) with a 32 GB solid-state drive in this old MacBook (64 or 128 would be better of course, but 32, I’ve determined, is trim enough to be usable without being a huge drag). The rest of my world is online, with storage at MediaMax and other spots, accessed when necessary, and containing all the data I need. At home, a hard drive which I would use as my disaster recovery device with Time Machine, or its descendant.

In essence, my crap will be available wherever I have a connection. And since that will be the case, there will no longer be any need to keep a massive hard drive inside the computer. Enough for the OS, applications and some storage, but the 160 GB drive in this MacBook will be superfluous and wasteful–How much of my battery is devoted to spinning up this stupid disk? And, we’re all one well-placed drop away from losing everything if the read/write heads are not properly parked on these fool machines.

Only thing: Virtual Memory. Windows is useless without some quick paging of memory back to the hard drive–I had a 750 MB file on the C drive of my old Dell that was only for paging. I imagine this Mac has the same thing. You used to be able to turn VM off on the old Macs, but that was because it actually dragged performance down on those old SCSI drives and 680×0 processors.

Apple’s .mac service has storage (10 GB–hell, I have that between two thumb drives!), and all the other online services (Google and MS) are following suit (sort of, in Google’s case).

I am keeping my eye out on eBay. Dell is already offering 32 GB SS drives for their machines. eBay has listings for the 32s as well. I am eyeing this for the “coming soon” list.

2 Trackbacks/Pingbacks

[…] One morning some years ago, I sat in a coffee shop in town and poked out a screed about what was up that day, which I re-read to re-fresh. I got some nookie earlier that morning, apparently–nice to hear that that used to happen to me sometimes. But I was also going on about not having internet access at home and hitting up the various wireless hotspots in the Old Pueblo to bumble around online when I wasn’t at work or trying to sleep. Which led me to talking about tha few-chaaah! ”The Cloud” is a big deal right now, but has been a long time coming. I am not going to claim prescience or anything like that. I will simply appreciate the hell out of this Mercury Aura Pro. […]

[…] to get and throw into your machine, if it didn’t already have one. Back in 2007, I figured most of my crap would be stored online by 2010. It took a little longer than that, but it’s true enough […]